Havana city, Cuba.- The Cuban Center for Advanced Studies (CEA) is working on the design of a test strip to detect viruses such as dengue, influenza, among other pathogens, an authorized source revealed.

Yorexis Gonzalez, director of Research, Specialized Services and Production of the entity and Doctor in Physics in Advanced Materials in Nanotechnology, told Prensa Latina that the project began with the Pedro Kouri Institute of Tropical Medicine to also reveal the presence of other diseases such as Zika and Chikungunya.

As he said, these developments come from the nanobioformulations laboratory and are part of a platform for the design of rapid response diagnostics for almost all viral agents. The facilities make them ideal to be in primary public health care.

Along these same lines, the CEA is working on the design of a biosensor for SARS-CoV-2, thanks to which the existence of the virus can be determined once a specific type of nanoparticle is added to the extracted RNA.

Commonly, he said, antigen or antibody biosensors are found, instead, this is similar to the technology used in the polymerase chain reaction method, or PCR, because the presence of the pathogen is detected in a very short time once the same genetic material has been extracted.

Other contributions of the entity to health are in the field of scientific publications.